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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edena_of_Neith" data-source="post: 1962977" data-attributes="member: 2020">The Aliador that Is(regards Serpenteyes' post on page one.)  I think a full appreciation of just what Serpenteye wrote is in order, as it relates to the elves.  Imagine that you were a five year old child, with very loving parents.  You lived with brothers and sisters who - incredibly - were also all five years old.  Now imagine your parents become sick.  They won?t tell you they are sick, but you know.  Your mother cries in pain all the time.  Your father chokes and makes strange, horrible sounds in the bathroom.  You see blood stains on the dinner table, in the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, on the bed.  Then, your parents, disappear.  They disappear, without a trace.  The police come, and when you ask them where your parents are, they - acting like monsters and not adults, or perhaps all adults are monsters? - tell you to shut up, then lock you in the house, barricading the doors, boarding up the windows, and telling you they will shoot you if you try to leave.  Looking through the gaps in the boards, you see that all the adults are now acting like monsters too.  They are killing each other, leaving bodies lying in the street, and they are advancing on the house with torches and knives, hatred and violence in their eyes.  Funny thing, but the police are encouraging them on, exhorting them to butcher and savage those rotten children, tear every toy to shreds, and destroy every last bit of the house.  Does this sound like something out of Stephen King?  Perhaps, it sounds like something out of A Nightmare on Elm Street?  Or, perhaps, it sounds like my bad imagination?  It is all of these at once, and for the elves of Aliador, the Lendores, and Celene, this is the REALITY.  This is what IS, for all those elves.  There is no way I could describe in my pathetic words the terror and horror, the shock, the trauma, that is endured.  Arvandor is under attack?  Arvandor may be destroyed?  Sigil has fallen?  The Seldarine may be dead?  Gotterdammerung has come, and the elves are completely alone ... in a world gone insane.  Now the insane monsters - all the enemies of the elves from time immemorial - are at the gates, and indeed inside the gates.  The devils, the most frightful and hated enemies of the elves, storm their way with ease right through all the guardians and defenders, to leave strange blueprints of strange and otherworldly devices at the feet of stunned rulers.  Now, the demons, the drow, the violent humans, the humanoids ... all of them ... have been invited into the most secret and sacred places of the elves.  They sit there in places that have been inviolate for millennia, these beings who would normally be attacked on sight.  The guardians do nothing.  The defenders do nothing.  The rulers, do nothing.  In all the elven nations, there is a state of utter shell shock.  Some elves collapse into catatonia.  Some commit suicide.  Many more go insane.  All suffer from debilitating fear, trauma, and shock.  Elven children, the most vulnerable of all, find themselves without parents to comfort them, to keep sanity in a world gone insane.  Children hide under the bed, in the cupboard, in the corner, under the blankets, while their parents weep and pray and collapse.  Perhaps, just perhaps, the scene briefly resembles what the Real World would look like, in the last minutes before the Bombs arrived.  Air raid sirens wailing, tens of thousands of incoming warheads, even the people on the television gone berserk or crazy.  -  When the Crystal Sphere is closed, and the end does not come, but the house is still boarded up and the crazy adults are still coming for the five year old children, the five year old children finally react.  In Eclavdras? case, she does what she thinks must be done, to save the drow people.  Her methods are absolute, her committment is absolute, and she demands absolute loyalty and committment from all the drow she conquers.  It isn?t pretty and it isn?t nice.  But, just maybe, it actually works, with the chaotic evil drow.  Maybe, and maybe not.  But elves are not drow.  Elves are a lofty people, who believe very strongly in the value of life, the value of the person, and the value of individuality.    The use of force, terror, and coercion, to unite the elven people, is not an option.  And there is not need for such things.  The elves still have something very important, something very precious, something that saves them:  they have something humans and drow do not have, and this something makes the difference and enables the elves to survive.  The elves, have the elves.  Unlike humans, elves are drawn to other elves in bonds of affection that are alien to humans.  It is not love between a man and a woman, it is most certainly NOT sexual, but it IS intimate, and it spans their entire society.  It is like Frodo and Sam, but it is much greater than that.  It could be compared to Elrond and Arwen.  It is an intense devotion and love, a thrill and a joy, a sharing and melding, that naturally occurs between elves.  Where humans would be horrified and appalled at such intrusion upon their individual privacy, where humans would be miserable in the company of others of their own kind, where humans would battle and fight for dominance in cliches and groups, the elves flourish and thrive in the closest of communes, the closest of interpersonal relationships, on a mass basis that spans hundreds of thousands of their kind.  Like those five year old children might do, the elves now turn to each other for comfort and emotional survival.  And because they are elves, and because of that intense closeness and bonding, that intense race wide communion (which ... almost ... rivals that of the illithid), they succeed.  The elves pull themselves out of the pit into which they were hurled.  The elves, come back from the emotional brink.  They come back, from the precipice upon which their race was about to fly off of.  Sanity and rational thinking returns.  Loyalty to society and their brothers and sisters reasserts itself.  Their deep trust in their rulers reasserts itself.  A sense of comfort reemerges against the horror, the terror, and the world gone mad.  And the elves, faced with that horror, turn even more to their own, in a deliberate, conscious move.  The initial reaction was instinctive:  this is conscious.  The elves move to comfort all their kindred.  They move to tighten bonds.  They close ranks throughout their society.  They vehemently assert loyalty to their culture and their rulers.  They take oaths to protect their families, their children, and all that they are.  The children of the elves, are finally able to come out from under the bed.  They finally, can come out from under the blankets.  They cautiously creep back out of their hiding places and dark corners into which they fled.  And the adults cherish their children, and feed strength to them now.  They hold their children in their arms, and they whisper words of eternal devotion and protection to them.  The looks of etched terror and pain on the face of children, lessens, as they realize their fathers and mothers are not gone, and there still is a world for them to be in.    And the adult elves, slowly come to realize that they are not alone either, and there is still a world for THEM to live in.  -  Only after the elves recover, does anything else happen.  Only after the elves recover, do they begin negotiations, alliances, and preparations for war.  Aliador takes over the Theocracy of the Pale, as previously stated.  Celene and the Yeomanry (a human nation in turmoil now) join the League of Athyr.  The Lendore Isles ally with Aliador.  Then the second great tragedy hits the elves, and it is a strong echo of the first and greatest tragedy.  The elves, send their children away to safety.  Children are sent to Baklunim, to Athyr, to Highfolk.  It is hoped the children can go to the Demiplane of Elves Highfolk can access.  Children are sent to Miranda, to Marchwards, to Elvanian Forest, and to the impregnable mountains of Gigantea and Hyperboria.  Anywhere that is away from imminent danger, the children are sent.  Aliador is surrounded by enemies, and her people know full well they face possible obliteration.  The safety of the children come first.  Likewise, the Lendore elves plead for their children to be sent to safety, and Aliador answers the call.  The Lendore elves face Portals to Arvandor now closed.  Gone are their Gods, gone is their Afterlife, gone is everything they had ever assumed, gone is the safe and ordered world they knew.  They still have each other, and in this the Lendore elves find comfort.  But comfort gives way to bitter pain as they realize their islands are vulnerable, and that their children must go to safety.  In a gesture of nobility, Aliador opens Gates to Ratik, that isolated and desperate nation in which many elves and half-elves are now trapped, and they gather from Ratik all who will come to the relative safety of Aliador, and they send all the children and civilians from Ratik who would come to the safety of other places.  And in the Theocracy of the Pale, which Aliador now controls, the elves send away the human children and human civilians - along with those human and dwarven and other children and civilians of Ratik - to safety.  The elves revere life, and although they are willing to sacrifice their own for each other, they will not sacrifice children.  So the horror is relived all over again, as parents and children are parted, maybe forever.  It is a scene out of nightmare.  This time, there is no togetherness to lessen the pain, or elven communion to relieve the heartbreak - indeed, the elven togetherness makes it worse, makes the separation all the harder to bear.  For the children of Aliador, it is a waking nightmare.  They are scarred for life.  If they survive, if they grow up, they will be a different people than their parents.  Perhaps a worse people, violent and traumatized.  Perhaps a better people, sadder and wiser.  But they will be different.</blockquote>

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